If you need to know what's important for the developer, you can rely on I Programmer to sift through all the news and uncover the most relevant stories. This weekly digest covers November 28 to December 4.

Programmer Puzzles

Talking through a problem is often a good way to see what is required for its solution. Reducing it in scale is another good strategy. But as programmers at the end of the day we need to code an algorithm that deals with the general case - and that means making the problem bigger.

Salseforce's inaugural hackathon led to an outcry from the developer community. After a review Salesforce has decided to award another $1 million to the team originally placed second. Will this satisfy the critics?

DARPA's Young Faculty Award program is an opportunity for junior faculty members to get involved with big, important projects and for the rest of us it provides a view into what topics DARPA thinks are hot when it comes to the new technological military.

During this year's Computer Science Education Week (December 9 -15) schools all over the US (and the wider world) are going to devote an hour of classroom time to teaching programming and there's a video tutorial about Processing that could be the ideal way to put programming into an Art class.

If you are contemplating getting involved in Bitcoin mining using a CPU or a GPU or even an ASIC, you need to see this report on how far it has gone. A secret facility mines Bitcoin using racks of liquid cooled hardware.

Earlier in the month, CyanogenMod released an easy way to install its alternative Android on a wide range of devices. It was in the Play store for about two weeks and now Google has asked for it to be removed.

Around a third of the UK's larger organizations - around 6,400 - will implement big data analytics programs in the next five years, pushing the demand for big data specialists up by 243 per cent to 69,000.

Babbage's Bag

Fractals - they are just for fun surely? You have to keep in mind that it is a law that eventually every pure mathematical idea finds an application and so it is with fractals. Fractal image compression is a practical use of fractals and how it works is fascinating ...